Cellular-related quality of service (“QoS”) issues are a significant source of frustration for service providers as well as their customers. Common QoS issues include bandwidth limitations, jitter, delay and latency, packet loss, and interference. QoS issues may result in a number of QoS problems for customers, potentially causing customers to change service providers. In one example, a customer may experience a “dropped call,” in which a phone call unexpectedly ends. In another example, a customer may experience a slow data transfer rate that is not suitable for transferring high-bandwidth content, such as video and music. In yet another example, a customer may experience unacceptable quality of service, causing customer dissatisfaction ranging from annoyance to anger.
The QoS problems may be exacerbated in that conventional cellular technology is generally optimized for voice. However, cellular technology is frequently improving to further enable the transmission of high-bandwidth content and other new services and applications in addition to voice. Many of these new services and applications are sensitive to QoS issues. As a result, the QoS problems are likely to increase and may become more challenging to resolve.